Three or four of them could be seen hurrying about on the island beneath the leafless trees. Then, suddenly, at the northern end, the boat showed again. Only two were in it, the bigger of the two boys, and the smaller of the red-capped girls. They rowed out from the island towards the middle of the lake. On the island there was great activity, and presently a thin blue wisp of smoke climbed up among the trees, a flicker of flame showed low down, then more smoke and more flames as the sticks caught and the fire gathered strength. A girl with a kettle came down to the water’s edge and dipped water from the lake.
“They must be making tea,” said Dorothea, dancing first on one foot and then on another, because her toes were very cold.
“Scientific expedition,” said Dick. “Landed to cook a meal. But . . . Hullo! . . . What are they doing now?”
Only one was left by the fire. The bigger red-capped girl, with the two children who had been sitting in the stern of the boat when they reached the island, came out on the cliff under the tall pine. She began waving a small flag on the end of a stick.
“Is it for us?” said Dorothea hopefully.
“No,” said Dick. “Look!”
In the boat, far out on the lake, the boy was resting on his oars. The red-capped girl who was with him was standing up. She, too, had a flag and had begun to wave it.
A shout of laughter sounded on the island.
“Peggy, you donk. You’ve got that one all wrong. Try it again.” That clear voice they had heard before rang out over the water.
There was more flag-waving in the boat, and more from the island. Then there was a pause, and a moment later the signalling began again, only this time the signallers had two flags apiece, and did not wave them but held the flags at arm’s length, first in one position and then in another.
“It’s awfully cold,” said Dorothea at last, “standing about like this.” She had been very happy, waking up in this new place, but those children in the boat had somehow spoilt things. What fun they were having, six of them, all together. A new story began to shape itself in her mind, one that nobody would be able to read without tears . . . The Outcasts. By Dorothea Callum. Chapter I.
“The two children, brother and sister, shared their last few crumbs and looked this way and that along the deserted shore. Was this to be the end?”
“Oh well,” said Dick. “We can’t help not having a boat. Let’s go and find a really good place for an observatory.”
*
“IS IT FOR US? ”
Time had passed quicker than they thought, while they had been looking at pigs and cows and enviously watching the children on the island. Mrs Dixon called them in for dinner just when they were asking Mr Dixon whether it would be all right for them to go up the cart track that seemed to climb up the fell from the gate on the opposite side of the main road. Mrs Dixon was in a hurry to get dinner over, because she was baking pork pies for which she had a name throughout the district. Her mind was in the oven and they got only the vaguest answers when they asked her about the children they had seen. “Yes. Staying at the farm along the road. Six of them? That would be the Blackett lasses as well . . . Dixon, do keep yon door shut, with pies in the oven and a cold wind enough to ruin all.” And then, after dinner, looking over her shoulder with her hand on the knob of the oven door wrapped in a fold of her apron, she told them, “Come you in at four o’clock for a cup of hot tea. You’ll be wanting dark for your star-gazing, and I’ll give you your supper later.”
The main road, along which they had come from the station the night before, after their railway journey with Mrs Dixon, ran close past the front of the house, where there was a strip of garden and a front door that was hardly ever used, for the Dixons and all their friends went through the farmyard to the door that opened into the big farm kitchen. Dick and Dorothea came round the house and out into the road between the garden and a huge barn. They looked both ways along the road, but they could not see far because, to the right, it bent sharply round towards the lake and, to the left, it disappeared in a wood. They crossed the road, went through a gate exactly opposite the farmyard, and followed a cart track up a steep little pasture, through another gate, and then to the left, up the fell, between patches of dead bracken and grey lumps of rock that thrust up here and there out of the short-cropped grass. “Not limestone,” said Dick, picking up a bit and putting it in his pocket. Dorothea smiled to see him do it. The stone would wear a hole in his pocket, of course, but it was no use saying so when Dick was thinking about geology.
They climbed up and up, and with every step they could see more of the lake beyond the woods, while, on the farther side, the snow-topped mountains seemed to rise higher and higher. Suddenly, as the track came over a shoulder of the hill, they saw on the open fell ahead of them an old grey barn.
“It’s the very place for an observatory,” said Dick. Geology was forgotten in a moment and he ran on up the track.
Dorothea followed, not so fast. She was looking at the barn and thinking what sort of story she could make to fit it. It was built of rough grey stones, and she could see a big dark doorway and stone steps outside the wall going up to a smaller doorway above. The doors seemed to have gone. The place must at one time have been used for something or other, but now it was falling into ruin.
The barn stood on the top of a ridge of hill coming down from the fells towards the lake. There was a shout from Dick. He beckoned to her with his telescope and stood there, beside the barn, looking down at the country on the other side of the ridge. In a few moments Dorothea stood beside him. Now for the first time they saw the great ring of hills above the head of the lake. There was the lake, like a wide river. There were a group of islands, and a cloud of smoke above the village. Then, nearer to them, just below the barn, was a little frozen tarn, cupped in a shallow hollow in the side of the hill. Beyond it to the right, woods climbed the hill-side. Below them they could see woods going down to the lake, and beyond the woods they caught glimpses of the main road between the fields. And down there, between the road and the lake, was a white farm-house and some out-buildings, not far above what seemed to be a narrow bay.
“Dot,” said Dick. “I bet that’s the farm-house where those children are staying, the ones Mrs Dixon knew about.”
“Bother them,” said Dorothea. She had been meaning to think of something else. But if Dick remembered them, when his mind was full of stones and stars, how could she possibly forget them?
“Bother them,” she said again. “What about your observatory?”
“You can see any amount of sky from up here,” said Dick. “And we can have a light in the barn for looking at the maps of the stars by.”
“It’ll be pretty cold,” said Dorothea.
But in the angle between the solid stone steps and the wall they found the remains of a fire, charred sticks, and a few stones to keep the fire in place. Someone had felt cold up there before them.
“What about that?” said Dick.
The barn itself was quite empty, and they decided that they could keep their firewood inside it. They climbed the stone steps. Nothing but the rusty hinges was left of the door that had been at the top of them. Gingerly, pressing with each foot before properly stepping on it, they went in. There were holes in the floor and the old planking creaked beneath them. They picked their way towards a big square opening in the end wall, through which, as it came right down to the level of the floor, they supposed bracken or hay had been pitched from a cart standing below.
“What a place to look out from,” said Dick. “And for all the northern stars . . . I say, you can see that farm even better from up here.”
“Perhaps we wouldn’t like them if